Search for authenticity is a privilege, even for Millennials

Millennials are a navel-gazing bunch since way back. Sure, we had our trophies for participation, but online, we had another dimension that probably started around the time of MySpace. Your profile page became incredibly focused on telling your story, in bland detail after bland detail with trite song lyrics mixed it.

With that demand to share yourself, you had to actually debate, as a teenager, what was my story? What means something to me? Who am I? Can us youngins' collectively share the same emotions from Green Day, a band that doesn’t really belong to us?

Now, when lists that ask about your first car or your first felony circulate from the GenXers and above, there’s an inclination to think, I’m sorry, I’m all done thinking about the one true film that defines me.

A GenX friend of mine speculated that millennials are reaching that state of authenticity faster, that we demand it without guilt from the get-go. However, I feel that it may only be happening in a certain layer of the millennial, the one that comes to mind quickly as the New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino describes as “the type of millennial that much of the media flocks to — white, rich, thoughtlessly entitled” which is “largely unrepresentative of what is, in fact, a diverse and often downwardly mobile group.”

We are diverse and we are mired in the quest of who we are, and not in a great way. Her article “Where Millennials Come From” speculates similar to what I think, that if “for the baby boomers self-actualization was a conscious project, and if for Gen X—born in the sixties and seventies — it was a mandate to be undermined, then for millennials it’s more like an atmospheric condition: inescapable, ordinary, and, perhaps, increasingly toxic.”

Due to privilege of support, I had time to reflect during college about what exactly I was doing in class would do in the grand scheme of life. It was clear, and horrifying, when the mismatch of theory and practice set in, as it probably does for many others, regardless of generation. My early 20s are a time I shudder to think about, even 10 years out, if not just for the horrible dating I did, but the gnawing and inescapable debate about who I was and how I would fit as a puzzle piece into the world.

After all that useless stewing, I fell into some very traditional elements. I’m married. I have kids. But it turns out, making those traditional decisions gave me the outline to a script that led me through motions that helped truly define me.

Have a partner who that doesn’t take your simpering inaction in stride, and it’ll push you along. Stare into the eyes of your kid, who even at the immobile potato-like stage stares up at you as their world, and freshly debate how you’ll model all the ideas you’ve ever seen trot across your field of vision as being the “right” thing to do. It gave me the strength to nontraditional things, like quitting jobs where I knew I wasn’t fulfilling my purpose. But, that too is an ability born out of the privilege of circumstance.

Millennials the Kings and Queens of Narcissism according to the elders, especially with the empty notifications glorifying our every move. But, what if we’re maturing alongside the technology we use, and that those youthful narcissistic tendencies will sway us away from the cesspool that we stare into and decide to walk away from all the things that don’t serve us in our new ways?

Cassie McClure is a writer, wife/Mama/daughter, fan of the Oxford comma, and drinker of tequila. Some of those things relate. She can be contacted at cassiemcclure@gmail.com.